Here the whole group in the lab of Computational conSequences during the Spring/Summer of 2015. I’d say that this is the best group ever.

Gustavo leaves today, going back to Michoacán, Mexico after spending his sabbatical here. Julie left a few weeks ago, also back to Michoacán. She might come back for the Spring/Summer 2016.

The only locals are Brigitte, Kissa, Thomas, César and me. Brigitte and Kissa being honorary members who have been in the lab for collaborative reasons, but work for their M.Sc. degrees with other faculty members at Laurier (Michael Suits and Geoff Horsman, respectively).

Several members of The Lab of Computational conSequences went to the Canadian Society of Microbiologists conference in Ottawa last week: Lisa, Jenny, Marc, Scott, and honorary members Mike Lynch, and Laura (Lisa’s sister). All of them presented posters, Jenny gave her first talk in a scientific conference, and Mike gave a talk that I missed on exploring “the rare biosphere” (your homework to figure out what that means).

Posters were successful, Marc, who is working on the evolution of regulation of transcription by, ahem, transcription factors, had lots of visitors, the twins (Lisa and Laura) presented work on the gene cluster for cellulose biosynthesis in Bacteria, Jenny talked about 16S rRNA genes, and Scott presented a bit about phage and horizontal gene transfer.

We shall talk about these projects some time soon. We are preparing several articles and will post something about them as they are finished and submitted.

The article twists the normal use of phylogenetic profiles, which is that of predicting functional interactions. The idea for phylogenetic profiles is that if we observe that two genes co-occur their products might work together. What does this mean? Well, to co-occur means to appear both in the same genome, and to be both absent whenever the either one would be absent. A most excellent idea. A most difficult one to use for actual predictions. OK then, hard to use for predictions? Why? Not sure, but, for starters, we can see that genes that work together in one organism do not co-occur that much across organisms. So I thought, maybe functional interactions are not well conserved. Maybe partners in functional crime are exchanged with ease. How would we know? Well, maybe if we look at the phylogenetic profiles of collections of genes whose products functionally interact we could see something of a rate of exchange, maybe the rates would be difficult to estimate, so what about comparing against the whole background of co-occurrence? What about finding some “gold standards”? … and that was like an eureka moment. What about comparing different kinds of interactions in terms of their conservation? So, I tried a few, and lo and behold, interactions via co-regulation (regulons) looked worse than a “gold negative,” namely transcription unit boundaries (adjacent genes in the same strand, but different transcription units).

So there you go. The most surprising result was the low levels of conservation for interactions mediated via regulons. The best part was that the most conserved interactions were those among genes found in the same transcription unit (in operons). Why best? Because a lot of my research has been about using operon predictions for predicting networks of functional interactions. Since these interactions are the most conserved, we might expect them to be the most useful to infer functional interactions. Right? Well, maybe. Still lots of research needed. I hope you enjoy the article.